1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print control apparatus that controls print data.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printer driver is an example of software for causing a printing apparatus such as a printer to execute print processing from an application running under an operating system (OS). A printer driver enables setting of various print modes such as paper cassette selection, color processing method settings, and paper ejection method selection according to the configuration of the printing apparatus. The printer driver converts print data (also referred to as document data) passed from an application along with the print modes to which the settings were made to a format that is acceptable to the printing apparatus, and sends them to the printing apparatus. Furthermore, the printer driver obtains document information for managing or displaying the document to be printed at the printing apparatus and adds the information to the print data. There may be a case where the printer driver is included in a print data managing system on the pathway to the printing apparatus, obtaining document information and managing and displaying the information. The document information is information necessary for print document management, such as a document name, user information, and time information.
Such document information is displayed on the print data managing system that manages print data or on a printing apparatus, and as a result, a user can specify a document that is in the process of printing, or can select a document to be printed from a document list stored in the printing apparatus.
Various techniques have been developed for a user to reliably specify a desired document in such a document list. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-14788 (particularly paragraph 0062) describes a print data supplying apparatus that is capable of setting print job information to a character form compatible with display capability of the display device of the print output device when the character form of the print job information is out of display capability of the print job information display means. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-91742 (particularly paragraph 0063) describes a print system capable of improving confidentiality of job data having confidential print settings when displaying status information relating to print status of the job data. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. H10-301727 (particularly paragraph 0120) describes a print management system in which rough image data is created based on print data and displayed along with the print job management information, and as necessary, the print job data is encrypted and decrypted. It is described that according to this print management system, each print job can be easily and reliably distinguished.
In the above described document information, user information and time information have a fixed length in many cases, and therefore a region for displaying such information can be easily reserved in advance. However, because the document name can be decided freely by a user and has a variable length, it is difficult to specify its length in advance. Thus, depending on the document name, there may be a problem in that the document name cannot be displayed entirely in the region reserved in advance. Also, in many cases, dates and version information is added generally to the end of the document name. Therefore, when the document name cannot be displayed entirely as described above, the user cannot specify the document reliably.
Furthermore, there also may be a case where a character string (for example, application name) for identifying the application is automatically added to the beginning of the document name depending on the application, even if the user gave the document name considering the number of characters that can be displayed on the printing apparatus or the like. Thus, there may be a case where the document name cannot be shown entirely during document name display.
The aforementioned Patent Documents do not specifically mention such a problem in displaying based on the length of the document name.